The Prison of Time

Wednesday, November 20, 2013 K.Z. Freeman 0 Comments

According to the Tantric mystics of Tibet, our perceptions of a universe existing in time are incorrect. Above and beyond this illusory reality is the void -- a region where the concept of time itself ceases to have any meaning. The Buddhists also recognize a world which exists beyond time. As eminent Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki states, "In this spiritual world, there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense..."

Because of our apparently linear and sequential experiencing of past, present , and future, it is hardly surprising that we interpret time as an absolute as opposed to a construct. But the physicists are slowly destroying this last myth and are developing an approach to time which more closely resembles the view long held by the mystics. At the moment we are caught between the future and the past in the immeasurable interim of the present. Nothing ever happens in the past (or the future). Everything occurs in the present. These are things we assume without question. So when the physicist Richard Feynman suggests that a positron moving forwards in time is actually an electron moving backwards through time, we must pause. Our thinking cannot readily accommodate the possibility that part of our universe (and even part of our consciousness) might exist beyond the prison of time.

- Mysticism and the New Physics